1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of software that automatically generates graphs from report data. More particularly, the present invention relates to automatically generating graphs by identifying regularities in reports and report data derived from reports.
2. Background of the Related Art
Reports output by application systems (hereinafter called “Reports”) are repeatedly (for example, daily or monthly) delivered to a user. Therefore, the users have to read the data in Reports repeatedly, which is a repetitive burden for them. Furthermore, most of such Reports normally are comprised of characters and Figures, and generally do not contain visual images, such as graphs and charts that make a report easier to comprehend and use.
Currently, there are a variety of graph drawing tools available. With each of those tools, the user has to select the necessary data to arrange (or extract) them into a table, from which a graph may be drawn. A similar procedure is required in case of spreadsheet application software, such as, for example, MS-Excel. That is, the user of Reports often re-enters necessary data in MS-Excel, mostly manually, and creates or extracts data to form tables that are then used to draw graphs.
Reports contain, in addition to data of vital importance for the user, information like titles, headers, etc., that show attributes of Reports and/or impart organization to the reports. Reports delivered to the user normally comprise voluminous pages, from a few pages up to hundreds of pages, and it is troublesome and time-consuming to select or extract the necessary data (e.g. totals) from the Reports.
Therefore, known prior art systems generate graphs from tabular data or other data whose format (i.e., spreadsheets) cannot be easily used (without additional extraction or alteration steps) for automatically generating customized (or user definable) graphs for a user. In particular, there are no known prior art systems that identify and use the regularity of reports to enable a user to automatically generate graphs from report data, based on fields identified from the regularity of reports.